Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Lemmy – A link aggregator for the fediverse

join-lemmy.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 227 posts

Re: Lemmy – A link aggregator for the fediverse

#111

Post by streamofdigits »

radicalriddler wrote: post #75

I would define myself as pretty progressive, but Reddit's been absolutely dog** due to all the anti-capitalist, populist rhetoric. Every post seems to be filled with comments these days of "eat the rich". Like, you'll have a gif of a dude petting a dog, and then in the comments, they'll be like, "Bro, you're financially oppressing this dog and that's why it's forced to be pet by you" (Hyperbole, but I've seen some cr…

Platform designers have a lot of control over features that influence (nudge is the official word I suppose) user behavior. But lets not kid ourselves, in large part the social media activity reflects also the attitude of people who participate.

Open source and federated platforms like lemmy will not magically fix the problem( * ). But they come with two killer advantages: 1) They are open, transparent and evolvable, hence diverse people can work on solutions and 2) Don't have private data monetization as their defining business model which frees up potential to explore less antisocial possibilities.

These "big picture" aspects will take some time to play out in full. But if you have the time there is nothing preventing you from setting up an instance that would strike the right balance (pun) and create history :-)

( * ) What would a "fix" look like? well thats not a easy question to get consensus on, but a workable definition is that at least people do not behave worse than in real life (as in person-to-person contact if you remember what that is :-)

Re: Lemmy – A link aggregator for the fediverse

#112

Post by tadzik_ »

spoonjim wrote: post #96
unicornporn wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matrix, Mastodon and PeerTube.

Is Mastodon federated in practice? I’m a member of several but they are all independent.

Independent as in: closed off? Servers that don't federate are extremely rare ime, except for the likes of Gab that most people just choose not to federate with.

Re: Lemmy – A link aggregator for the fediverse

#113

Post by numpad0 »

potamic wrote: post #44

Could someone ELI5 how the federation model works in practice? From the understanding, there is one entity that owns the core technology but the operators of the servers are distributed and independent. How do they typically manage things like scale, data growth, security, monetisation etc.? Is the experience likely to vary a bit across the operators? And how do users trust which operators then want to join?

Don’t scale well rn. Mastodon Fediverse split-brain’d facing influx of manga drawings that are orthogonally illegal in two regions

Re: Lemmy – A link aggregator for the fediverse

#114

Post by account42 »

strenholme wrote: post #108
unraveller wrote: post #39

The front-end is still buggy and needs a designer's touch. And the real-time aspects wear thin at scale with all the notifications in a mismatch of languages showing up in the main feed. Lemmy is practically unusable without a personal feed filter, it seems that of the new reddit alternatives only retalk_[1] want to get this right. If you do decide to run an instance of lemmy be sure to nuke the absurd word filter -…

The problem with Retalk is this: It’s closed sourced. If we want to talk about Reddit alternatives, I would rather we look at ones which are open source, including Reddit itself until 2017 [1], the Mastodon Twitter-like web app [2], Discourse [3], Lemmy [4] (use a fork [5] if you can’t stand the slur filter), and the old school PHP discussions boards like PhpBB [6] and MyBB [7]. [1] https://github.com/reddit-archive/…

> use a fork [5] if you can’t stand the slur filter

I'd rather not support the ecosystem at all if they pull stunts like this.

Re: Lemmy – A link aggregator for the fediverse

#115

Post by kypro »

enumjorge wrote: post #42
peakaboo wrote: post #30

People who don't see why platforms like these are critically important has never had an opinion that isn't allowed on the major tech platforms.

By and large what “isn’t allowed” on major tech platforms is racist, xenophobic, and homophobic content. You can still find a lot of non-PC, fringe content on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Reddit. I get that censorship in major tech platforms is problematic, but the sense of martyrdom in comments like yours feels a little overwrought.

Are you even paying attention? This isn't true. You can be censored from social media for all sorts these days. This last year we had a UK media organisation banned from YouTube for questioning the UK COVID response. People in the US are no longer allowed to question the legitimacy of their elections on most social media platforms. Even US media outlets like the NYPost were censored for running stories Twitter didn't like during the US election.

Yeah, sure you can be banned for questioning if an untransitioned man wearing a wig is really a women, but this isn't what most people are concerned about. The censorship has now gone far further and in many cases to simply disagree with mainstream narrative on some politically charged subject will be enough to have you removed. One of my favour YouTubers "Mouthy Buddha" was banned for making some videos about Epstein and paedophilia -- the guy produced "conspiracy" content but it's really high quality stuff with no hate at all.

I mean even the US president was banned for "violence" despite asking rioters to go home, being acquitted and the FBI finding that there was no coordinated insurrection plan.

I'm not coming at this from any political position. A lot of content social media platforms censor I don't like, but that doesn't mean I think it should be censored. Things like racism have been deliberately defined in a very loose way that practically anything can now be considered racist and used as an excuse to censor. A popular comedian in the UK got banned during the world cup for saying, "all I'm saying is, the white guys scored". He was mocking how the UK media had been running stories for weeks about how the "diversity" of the England team is what made them great, but that wasn't allowed because "racism".

Re: Lemmy – A link aggregator for the fediverse

#116

Post by numpad0 »

tadzik_ wrote: post #112
spoonjim wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Mastodon federated in practice? I’m a member of several but they are all independent.

Independent as in: closed off? Servers that don't federate are extremely rare ime, except for the likes of Gab that most people just choose not to federate with.

Remote follow don’t work as good as hardcore users would like it to. Federation mechanisms would have to have kilo- to mega-posts/second bandwidth but not happening.

Also that federation choice being in hand of instance owners makes an account on each instances a must. You are going to have a person or two that your instance owners don’t like, or instance or two that don’t like yours.

Re: Lemmy – A link aggregator for the fediverse

#117

Post by numpad0 »

echelon wrote: post #82

Federated Reddit and federated toots and all that shit are just too obtuse and like the old regime. It's too hard to set up and run your own node, and joining an existing one is just like joining Reddit or Facebook. The optimal way to distribute social news: bittorrent-style P2P swarms. People copy and paste news articles with photos (maybe this is piracy?) and share them as files with known hashes. The swarm pulls d…

Did you seriously just reinvent Winny there!?

Re: Lemmy – A link aggregator for the fediverse

#118

Post by account42 »

peakaboo wrote: post #30

People who don't see why platforms like these are critically important has never had an opinion that isn't allowed on the major tech platforms.

I don't think Lemmy wants to be open to different opinions either: https://github.com/innereq/lenny#the-lemmy-problem

Re: Lemmy – A link aggregator for the fediverse

#119

Post by newswasboring »

b112 wrote: post #85
reginold wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How strange they would include word filters that are hard to edit. Seems counter to their whole mission...what? Edit: actually it would make sense if word filters themselves were hard to add. But having their own filter and making that hard to edit is bonkers.

Reading the whole bug, it's literally a political stance with no teeth or real purpose. It's bizarrely all for show, serves no real purpose, is functionally deficient, and the DEVs know this. Further, a 10 line script could easily patch each new version, replacing the hardcoded code with a loadable text file. Done. Updates would take zero time to deploy. It's all about taking a position. Taking a position is fine. Bu…

> Reading the whole bug

Is there a link where I can also read this bug?

Re: Lemmy – A link aggregator for the fediverse

#120

Post by null0pointer »

twelvechairs wrote: post #52

What happens with moderation of unethical subs? The docs say "each instance has a set of administrator Users, who have the power to do site-wide removals and bans." So does that mean someone can start an instance for (as examples) covid deniers or white supremacists and reject any request to ban them? Or is there broader community input? What happens if I run an instance and these subs become popular - am I going to…

My understanding of how federated social networks work is that a server operator can firstly moderate the content on their own server as they see fit, and secondly blacklist other servers from syncing data with their own if they don’t approve of the content it hosts.
Post reply on HN